The Knife is a surgeon in the UK. He will post on anything he likes: politics, our culture, health and the NHS, the arts – anything. Why would you bother to read yet another blog? I don’t really know…
“There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.”
Thomas Sowell
Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow: He who would search for pearls must dive below
John Dryden
"Such is the nature of men, that however they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will hardly believe there are many so wise as themselves; for they see their own wit at hand, and other men's at a distance..."
Thomas Hobbes
(On Blair) If you think he was a charlatan who wrecked the constitution, took us deeper into Europe and did immense damage by not taking any interest in economics, believing his neighbour's lunatic contention that he has "ended boom'n'bust", then today at Leveson wasn't really for you.
Iain Martin, Telegraph Blogs, 28/05/12
No other private enterprise could get away with behaving like the water companies. Can you imagine Tesco losing a fifth of all its groceries on the way to the supermarkets and then passing on the bill to customers?
Richard Littlejohn, Daily Mail, 29/05/12
I think more of the little kids from a school in a little village in Niger who get teaching two hours a day, sharing one chair for three of them, and who are very keen to get an education. I have them in my mind all the time. Because I think they need even more help than the people in Athens.'
Christine Lagarde of the IMF
The UAE is said to be trying to stamp out licentious behaviour, although this has not yet impinged upon the hundreds of Russian whores who throng every bar and nightclub. There is almost nothing to do in Dubai except have sex in the back of a car, and then get arrested by some repressed and vindictive little Hitler.
Rod Liddle, Spectator, 19/05/12
Zimbabwe printed so much money that they actually ran out of the ability to purchase the ink to print the money.
Tim Worstall, Blog 18/05/12
...the Liberal Democrats are not, and never have been, the Party of the nation. Their outlook is well represented by Nick Clegg, who describes himself as an internationalist, but who would be better described as a cosmopolitan nihilist.
Roger Scruton, Con Home, 10/05/12
'Traveller, there is no path; paths are made by walking.'
Antonio Machado
“The Holocaust was conceived to annihilate the last Jew on the planet. Does anyone believe that [the Serbs] seriously planned to exterminate all the Bosnians, all the Albanians, all the Muslims in the world?”
Elie Wiesel (courtesy of Brendan O'Neill, Telegraph Blogs, 17/05/12)
One marvels that a Government that has the brass neck to urge those in the private sector to work harder can virtually in the same breath permit civil servants to stay at home. The inconsistency is scarcely credible.
Stephen Glover, Daily Mail, 17/05/12
The BBC has many faults that make it hard to defend. It spends far too much money, far too freely, and uses far too many staff for stories covered just as well, if not better, by its lesser-resourced rivals.
James Macintyre, The Guardian, 15/05/12
Obama’s culture war is backfiring. He seems convinced that it's a vote winner – hence his recent appearance at an elite women's college where he urged the graduates to join his fight for free contraception and abortion. Not "Work hard" or "Build a family" but "Fight for the right to have hot super sex at a low, low cost to your insurance provider." Change you can believe in.
Tim Stanley, Telegraph Blogs, 15/05/12
Gordon Brown's catastrophic attempt to buy votes with taxpayers' money has left Britain with a swollen public sector which we simply cannot afford. The Coalition has talked about cutting it back, but is still spending even more than the last Labour Government. It's not their fault, but the reality is that there are now far too many public sector workers. Many of them are in jobs that don't need doing, many more are grossly overpaid
Simon Richards, Daily Mail, 13/05/12
..the Greens will set about choosing a replacement (leader) in the traditional manner: whoever can eat a four course meal in a vegan restaurant, and survive, wins. Expect the contest to come down to a tight race between an unshaven sociology lecturer and a dolphin called Roger. Roger will win on personality.
Tim Stanley, Telegraph Blogs, 14/05/12
The NHS has got to save £20bn over the next four years, and the idea...there are no job losses is frankly absurd.
Peter Carter, Head of the Royal College of Nursing
As for Mr Brown, I hope his constituents are happy with his failure to represent them at this event. Was he ill? Was he abroad on some money-raising manoeuvre? Or couldn’t he be fagged? Is he simply a sulking disgrace, contemptuous of the parliamentary democracy which projected him to the highest offices of the kingdom?
Quentin Letts, Daily Mail, 11/05/12
Every decision, speech, policy statement or impromptu visit to the bathroom is presented as a piece of “history” – the dawn of a new era. (Obama) could go seal-clubbing and much of the media would see it as a new epoch for winter sports
Tim Stanley, Telegraph Blogs, 11/05/12
Labour's Coulson "outrage" is utter hypocrisy. He may have had access to top secret dossiers, but at least he didn't fucking write them.
Mr Eugenides, Twitter, 10/05/12
(The Times') front-page headline-writers tried to claim the guilty men were in fact all of us. The headline: ‘A nation’s shame.’ Taking a leap and assuming that most of my readers are not involved in gang-organised child-rape, how much of that shame do you feel like shouldering?
Douglas Murray, Spectator Coffee House, 10/05/12
Muslims, (are) understandably sensitive to any hint that the Prophet might have been a plagiarist...and yet, once God is discounted as an informant, it is surely not unreasonable to wonder just how it came to be that so many characters from the Bible feature in the Qur’an.
Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword, 2012
Black social conservatives are liberalism’s worst nightmare – almost as bad as prolife women ...Beyond their taste for old time religion, why are these black activists so enraged by the latest manifestation of homosexual rights? One reason is that they take enormous offence at the claim that black and gay civil rights struggles are analogous. They insist that three hundred years of slavery and one hundred years of segregation are not comparable to the struggle for gay marriage
Tim Stanley, Telegraph Blogs, 08/05/12
"Do you mean to say the story is finished?" said Don Quixote. "As finished as my mother" said Sancho
Don Quixote, Part 1: XX, Cervantes
The point was put well by Von Mises in “The Anti-Capitalist Mentality”: “A man who buys a television set thereby gives evidence to the effect that he thinks that the possession of this contrivance will increase his well-being and make him more content than he was without it. If it were otherwise, he would not have bought it.” Unless of course he doesn’t know what is good for him, which is exactly where the left comes in.
Andrew Gibson, The Commentator, 10/04/12
On moral relativism: “it will bring down a curse upon us worse than that which God called down on the builders of Babel; rather than our speaking different languages, not to be speaking a genuine language at all.”
The late Sir Michael Dummett, philosopher
Those photos of Libby the dog taking a dump at Crufts took me right back....to 2008, when I had the pleasure of judging the finals of Miss Dundee
Frankie Boyle, The Sun, 16/03/12 (it's a joke)
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June 7, 2011 at 11:51 am
Good stuff. It is high time that the ‘Tartan’ Mr Toad has the peep taken
out of his gas.